The Election Highlighted a Growing Rural-Urban Split

Donald J. Trump fared very poorly in American cities in Tuesday’s election. Hillary Clinton did just as badly among rural voters. The political divide between the two groups has been growing more stark in America for years, and 2016 showed an even sharper split than 2012.

Multiple forces are pulling the American geography apart, as the inner- and middle-ring suburbs remain the contested political ground in between. The election reinforces the feeling that the prosperity of many metropolitan areas is not shared by the rest of the country.

Mr. Trump made no real play for urban voters, despite living and running businesses in their midst. He went so far as to depict them as dystopias, a strategy that has long helped Republicans stoke enthusiasm among voters outside cities. And so it is little surprise that the urban counties that include Austin, Tex.; Chicago; Los Angeles; Oakland, Calif.; Portland, Ore.; Seattle; Denver; and Newark voted for the Republican candidate in this election in record-low numbers.

Mr. Trump’s own Manhattan gave him just 10 percent, a new nadir for a G.O.P. presidential candidate in the borough. His soon-to-be home, Washington, gave him just 4 percent.

Most of the change, though, occurred not around the big cities — where Democratic candidates have only so many votes left to pick up — but far outside them. Just 15 counties tilted by more than five percentage points in favor of Mrs. Clinton relative to how they voted in 2012. By contrast, 1,826 moved by at least that much away from the Democratic candidate.

The counties that swung the most drastically toward Mr. Trump, by 15 points or more, were nearly all in the Midwest. That abrupt shift was probably driven by numerous factors that are hard to untangle: weak economic prospects; Mrs. Clinton’s lack of attention to those places on the campaign trail; Mr. Trump’s xenophobic message to voters anxious about change.

But the widening political divergence between cities and small-town America also reflects a growing alienation between the two groups, and a sense — perhaps accurate — that their fates are not connected.

The University of Wisconsin political scientist Katherine J. Cramer, the author of “The Politics of Resentment,” described what this looked like during years of field research in Wisconsin in an insightful interview with Jeff Guo at The Washington Post. The people she met across a state that Mrs. Clinton ultimately lost felt deeply disrespected (and suspicious of a white-collar academic from uber-blue Madison). “They would say, ‘The real kicker is that people in the city don’t understand us,’ ” Ms. Cramer said. “ ‘They don’t understand what rural life is like, what’s important to us and what challenges that we’re facing. They think we’re a bunch of redneck racists.’ ”

Cities, for their part, are easily branded with some dissonance as embodying either professional elites or poor people who don’t deserve benefits (thus both Madison and Milwaukee, two very different places, come in for equal resentment within Wisconsin). Many of the young Democratic voters who live in blue cities like these, as Alec MacGillis has noted, have gravitated away from redder parts of the country from which they felt alienated. “There’s just nothing to do in Ohio,” lamented one voter who grew up there but now lives in Los Angeles. “The jobs are limited, but it’s not just the jobs and the industries that are in Ohio, it’s the mind-set that I didn’t gravitate to.”

As the relationship between density and partisanship has grown stronger over the last half-century, the structure of the economy has also changed in ways that reinforce the divide.

At the height of Detroit’s auto industry in the early 1950s, the C.E.O. of General Motors, Charles Wilson, memorably pronounced that what was good for the country was good for his company, and vice versa. That’s no longer true of the major industries in big American cities (or the people who work for them), argues Aaron Renn, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. G.M. had trouble selling cars when the national economy was bad. Its customer base depended on a stable middle class far from Detroit. That’s not true today of Facebook, or Google, or Goldman Sachs, Mr. Renn says. They don’t rely on dealers all over the country. Their bottom lines aren’t tied to material prosperity in small-town Wisconsin.

“In a sense, the high-end economy in these urban areas is disconnected from the success from the rest of the country,” Mr. Renn said. And the very things that drive success in Silicon Valley’s tech industry, or New York City’s financial sector, are what worries rural America: globalization, foreign trade, immigration. “Goldman Sachs and Google do not really need America to be a broad-based middle-class success in order for them to be personally successful.”

Those economic forces will probably grow only stronger, even as the effects of an election that pushed urban and rural America further apart recede.